Technical Field
The disclosure generally relates to a transaction-level simulation technology, and relates to a transaction-level thermal simulation device and method.
Background
As the complexity of chip designs increases, product-development schedules in the traditional register-transfer level (RLT) are becoming longer and longer. In addition, current chip designs call for high integration between hardware and software, and as a result, the schedule of the software is added to the product-development schedule. Traditional register-transfer level methods can't provide the required simulation environment for the software in the preliminary design of the hardware design. Therefore, the Electronic System Level (ESL) method needs to be adopted to reduce the schedule of the hardware and the software. Reusing the Electronic System Level model is becoming more and more popular to transform the Electronic System Level model to a register-transfer level using a High-Level Synthesis tool.
It has been confirmed that the Electronic System Level method can effectively reduce the schedule of the hardware and software and increase the benefits in terms of the Time-to-Market of the product. In addition, as the complexity of system design increases, there are more and more concerns that relate to the problems with temperature. In the preliminary design, the designer needs to consider and plan for the cost, performance, and power consumption of the design. The designer also needs to simulate the effects of temperature variation, the effects of the element maybe burning out, and make a determination about whether to add a heat-removal mechanism, whether to change the layout of the design, whether to adjust the voltage and frequency, and host of other design issues.
In addition, power consumption is an important problem in chip design. As the complexity of system design increases, power consumption may become a key factor in system performance and cost. Therefore, it is important that power-consumption estimates be made early on in the design stage and in higher design level (e.g. transaction-level).
However, although power consumption can be estimated at the current transaction-level, it is not easy to perform a thermal simulation because of the complex algorithms involved and the thermal simulation software (ANSYS-Icepak and Metor-FloTHERM) required. The complex algorithms and thermal simulation software incur a high cost, require a lengthy computation time, and their capacity is often not sufficient. As a result, they are not suitable for performing a thermal simulation at the transaction-level. Therefore, how to increase the efficiency and performance of the thermal simulation at the transaction-level is a subject worthy of discussion.